Category Archives: Social Media & Social Networking

Representing Your Brand

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How Call Centers Expertly Represent your Brand

There is a significant amount of trust that is placed on call agents to effectively represent a company’s brand. As an agent, being on the frontlines of communication with a business’s existing and potential clients is a huge responsibility that is taken extremely seriously. This is why we have implemented extensive training so that our representatives can become an expert in your business’ services and products. 

Our agents are familiar with a number of different industries. Amidst our valuable experience, there are certain ways you can assist us in ensuring that we are representing you and your brand efficiently. 

How can you help? 

On top of understanding the industry your company resides in, we want to make certain that we can personally advocate for your brand. Here are some ways you can help us learn the ins and outs of your business:

Indicate your company values

This is an important step for aligning your business’ values with the messages that are communicated by our agents. Once we know your company values, we can ensure that we are creating the best experience for your clients while simultaneously acting through your business’ principles.

Create a script 

Creating a script for our representatives to follow is highly encouraged. This will guarantee that our agents are communicating consistent messages to your clients. A script will also allow for our call agents to advertise your products and services in a succinct manner. Lastly, we can offer feedback about the script as our representatives are experiencing firsthand what does and does not work.

 

Maintain an updated website

Making sure your business’ website is up-to-date will not only provide context for our agents, but it can also help with fielding client calls. DataReportal states that there are 4.95 billion global internet users –with so many people on the internet, you are bound to have existing and future clients visit your website! If you have incorrect information on your website, people will call to inquire or complain. Ensuring all of your information is correct and up-to-date is essential.

Guidance

Finally, our team of agents will also learn from observing how you interact with your customers along with what TO say and what NOT to say.  

Summary

We will do everything we can to become an extension of your company. Overall, we have curated the perfect way to be the best brand representative for your business. Whether it’s for customer service, sales or marketing, our representatives will be specially trained on the products and services that your company offers. Our agents are dedicated, highly-skilled, culturally aligned, and ready to represent your brand!

boost productivity

Three Ways to Give Call Center Agent’s Productivity a Boost

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A vital aspect of a successful business is productivity. Hence, the entire team of agents need to work together to become a properly-working unit. Moreover, the employers need to make sure that their employees have the resources to fully thrive. If those resources include proper training, advanced technology, or positive feedback, employees count on their bosses for the right guidance.

Indeed, there are three main things that a call center can do to boost their productivity: increase agent engagement, organization, and constantly make improvements.

Increase Agent Engagement

How can you get your agents more engaged in their work? Indeed, one of the best ways to get employees to feel more passionate about their work is listening to their feedback and implementing their ideas. There are many ways to allow agents a chance to voice their ideas: get their opinion on training topics, ask if there are things that could be improved, see if they enjoy their technology. Certainly, the possibilities are endless!

Secondly, you can make an agent feel like a valued member of the team (and therefore, increase their engagement) by offering flexible hours. Allowing people to choose when they get to work is a big deal for employees. If they are forced into a shift that they are unhappy with, or doesn’t work with other commitments, the employee won’t fully focus on the work in front of them.

Lastly, make work fun! Find a way to incorporate games or small awards to get employees excited about working. Creating these tasks can boost productivity and camaraderie in the workplace. People who enjoy their jobs are more likely to work harder. Therefore, having a work environment that agents are looking forward to will boost productivity.

Organization

Organization for Productivity

Imagine walking into your workplace and no materials are organized. Papers are scattered, chords are tangled, and you have no idea where your list of tasks went. Where do you start? Working in an unorganized environment can make people feel not only overwhelmed, but also unsure of direction and unmotivated.

Productivity is hard to achieve when employees or a company do not know their purpose. What goals are you working towards, what are the core values of the company, how do you carry out expectations? Knowing answers to these types of questions can help organize a company and its employees.

Furthermore, when a company is unorganized, the clients are affected as well. Nobody wants to call a company and get put on hold for 20 minutes, or get passed around to six different employees. You want to reduce your handling time with customer service. Your reputation and business can go downhill quickly, thanks to poor reviews on sites like Google.

As an employer, you can help this by having meetings to realign focus. You can hand out weekly goals, keep track of important statistics (for example, hold times), and check-in with your employees to see if they have any concerns.

Make Necessary Improvements

Even if your business is doing well, you can always seek out ways to improve. There are many ways that you can incite a positive change in your business:

  • Budget for better technology if yours is outdated or install newer softwares
  • Offer consistent training and refresher meetings
  • Communicate with your team
  • Set goals and voice clear objectives
  • Motivate your employees in slower seasons

Truly, there are numerous ways that you can improve your business. In turn, your productivity gets boosted and your employees are happier at work. If you ever run out of ideas for improvements, turn to your team and encourage brainstorming. A communicating unit is a cohesive one!

Summary

You have the tools for success and an efficient call center! In summary, the three main keys for productivity (engagement, organization, and improvements) are within your reach and attainable. There are many ways for you to implement these strategies, but remember to take your goals one step at a time. Taking on too many tasks at once is not great for productivity!

KPI Connect knows all about the work that has to go into creating a productive team. Our talented call agent team works hard to achieve the reputation that we have today!

KPI Connect

With over 12 awards under our belt, we at KPI Connect take pride in our business and our agents. Certainly, we train our agents to be ready for any problems and help them by offering updated software, technology, and coaching.

If you need help improving your business, we can do it. The KPI philosophy is three words: collaborate, communicate and connect. Along with understanding your business, we want to become an extension of the company so we can help customers quickly. We can help you reach goals if your company needs improvement on customer service, profit, or productivity.

Contact us if you require assistance. We always look forward to working with new clients and helping solve company issues!

KPI Connect

Is Outsourcing To A Contact Center Right For My Business?

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The days of outdated call centers are long gone, and outsourcing is becoming a great option for businesses. No more does customer service come last, or are calls per hour the most important performance metric. We are now in the era of the modern contact center, and customer service is the number one priority.

Modern contact centers show a new way to approach customer service. Also, they offer large and small businesses a number of benefits. We have come up with a list about why you should outsource your customer service to an experienced contact center.

Six Reasons for Outsourcing

Tools

Modern contact centers use several formats to reach your customers. Experienced centers leverage social media, email, live chats and mail in addition to traditional phone calls. Having the ability to communicate with your customers in the method they prefer will improve their experience.

Cost Savings

Cost savings is one of the biggest benefits of using a contact center to manage your customer service . Contact centers spread the equipment, facility, training, and other costs among their clients. In turn, businesses save on overhead costs. Moreover, contact centers can save you money as they are adept at planning for peaks and valleys of customer inquiries. Therefore, they can staff accordingly. Also, clients are able to pool their resources with other clients and share agents. Another way to reduce costs! High-quality contact centers have the skills, equipment, and staff needed to deliver affordable, top-notch customer service. 

Quality Control

Contact centers thrive when their clients and customers are happy. All excellent contact centers have rigorous quality control processes in place to make sure you and your customers receive top-notch service.

Latest Technology and Systems

Reputable contact centers ensure that their employees and clients have access to the latest technology and systems used to reach customers. It is in your contact centers’ best interest to keep up-to-date on the latest trends and technologies. That way, you can ensure they remain competitive.

Availability

When you outsource your customer service to a contact center, you can choose your availability based on your customers’ needs. Whether you need to handle customer questions 24/7 or for a few hours each day, a dedicated contact center can help you meet those needs.

Language Skills

Many experienced contact centers employ associates that speak more than one language, like English and French. By outsourcing your customer service to a bilingual contact center, you can ensure that you meet even more of your customers’ needs.

No matter if you are a Fortune 500 company or a small business, hiring an experienced contact center to manage your customer service is great for business. Whether you are interested in saving money, need to provide customer service for extended hours, need bilingual staff, or are looking for new and creative ways to communicate with your customers, look into utilizing a modern contact center for all your customer service needs.

The 4P’s of Social Media Marketing

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Social media and social networking have taken the world by storm. From the individual frequently updating details of their daily activities, to companies using it as a promotion tool for winning new business and maintaining healthy relationships with their customers, we see this form of engagement catapulting its way to the forefront of our daily lives. As businesses continue to evolve and adapt to the trends and changes within the environment, social media and social networking blazes its way into organisations, becoming a key functional area, embedded into corporate strategies.

-Target, America’s third largest retailer and fast-growing social brand, uses social media to send customized posts based on users’ locations as well as a digital coupon dispenser.

-Global telecommunications provider Sprint, has two Facebook pages: 1 page which provides special offers and discussion boards and another which offers free ringtones.

All companies should keep the following in mind when embarking on a social media/networking strategy:

-What goal does my company’s social networking page and content aim for?
-What tone should be conveyed in each post?
-Who am I trying to attract?
-Remember the principles of good grammar and punctuation.

So how do you effectively tailor your content to ensure optimal exposure across the various social networks your company employs? Let’s explore the topic by looking at what we’ve termed as the 4P’s of SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING.

Be PUNCHY:

One must have an immediate impact with the content being delivered. Posting content on social networking sites has as its biggest limitation; the number of characters allotted in a single post. Twitter is a prime example, where bloggers are restricted to a maximum of 140 characters to convey a single thought or message to the audience. This means that there is no room for the ‘flowery’ language and fillers that we have become accustomed to in our everyday writing. Content needs to be precise and straight to the point. Facebook in recent years became more lenient with its character limitations. From its inception, users were allotted character limits of 160 to 420 (in 2009) to 500 (in 2011) to 5,000 (in 2011) and finally over 60,000 (late 2011). Though content bloggers or ‘facebookers’ enjoy this increase, businesses need to bear in mind that only a brief portion of this high-character content appears within the news feed update of the reader/subscriber. This means that within at least 100 characters (spaces included), you need to be precise and punchy, inspiring the reader to perform the call to action of clicking the continue to read more option, be it on the same network or through the provision of a back-link to an article or blog site, where there is more freedom with your discourse.

Be PERSONABLE:

When implementing a social media/networking strategy, keep in mind that this is your company’s opportunity to get deeply involved with its clients and community on a level that inspires high round-the-clock engagement as well as the possibility of positive consumer/buyer actions. That being the case, one must present the company as being personable. After-all, its social media; ‘let’s get social’.

One’s approach should be to have a pleasant online appearance and manner, adopting a soft sell strategy rather than a hard sell, where readers/followers/fans are engaged by asking thought provoking questions, guaranteed to spark interesting page or forum discussions. Be an available resource for any questions or queries posed by your online community, always willing to offer help when it is needed and if you are unable to provide an immediate solution or answer directly, be eagerly willing to seek the information or refer to a relevant third party.

It is okay to share the content of others on your page. Your business like its followers will have varying interests. Part of adopting a personable approach would be to show your community that you both have similar interests. Provide interesting links to blogs or media about topics that are related to your company’s operations. A department store distributor like PC Richard & Sons carrying a wide range of computer or electronic brands maybe likely to share content from a software developer’s page for example Apple or Microsoft because of the hand-in-hand complement that one lends to the other’s operations.

Highlight your page’s achievements. When your company page has reached a milestone in the number of followers, likes/shares, make mention of the achievement. Also highlight accomplishments of your company as well as staff. Take the opportunity through this platform to showcase your company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives.

PENETRATE:

“Offer engaging, compelling, relevant, conversation provoking content”.

Any content posted is done under the objectives of attaining the following actions:

-Like your page/post/blog
-Follow company
-Leave a comment
-Share the content
-Learn more
-Visit a website

The bottom line of it all is that your social media/networking strategy will only be successful if the information being shared is compelling and interesting enough to drive positive as well as profitable consumer action. That said, you should know your community. What topics best attract the type of follower you will be catering to? How regular do you intend to offer content to these persons?

Wherever possible, write content in the active voice rather than the passive voice. Adopting this type of style makes your content a lot stronger by giving credit to an action, plus you use fewer words to convey messages.

PUNCTUATION & Grammar

While you adapt a personal somewhat informal approach, this becomes no excuse for obvious use of incorrect punctuation and grammar. As mentioned before, the issue of character limits may restrict an individual from fully punctuating a post as needed. To remedy this, use abbreviations:

-Contractions: Abbreviated versions of a word or words. For example: replacing missing letters with an apostrophe:- don’t, can’t, shouldn’t, he’s
-Compressing words: Mr., Dr., Prof., Rev.
-Initialism: abbreviations that are pronounced one letter at a time. Example: FBI, HTML, IBM, DVD
-Acronyms: these are abbreviations that are pronounced as words

Remember, when using acronyms and abbreviations only use those that are highly recognized by your community. No one wants to read a post and not understand what they are reading. In addition, let’s not overuse abbreviations in one single post. Can you imagine reading a single thought written fully in an abbreviated form? I can’t either.

However, there maybe instances where standard punctuation and incorrect use of grammar could be accepted. In countries or communities where there is a strong national language or dialect, it may work in a company’s favour to post content using local languages or vernacular to appeal to nationalistic senses of your community. This works only in cases where the community spans over a relatively small geographic area as opposed to global companies with global brands. Be that as it may, whether you write using the standard form of English or a dialect, there are fundamentals that guide its use.

 

Author: Dexter R. Norville, Director Marketing (KPI Connect)

infographic discussing 4 P's of social media marketing